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African Voting in the United Nations General Assembly

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 November 2008

Benjamin D. Meyers
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Extract

This article is an attempt to use some of the quantitative techniques of political science to provide a factual description of the voting behaviour of the African members in a selected session of the United Nations General Assembly. Drawing primarily upon methodology that has been used in studies of the United States Congress, 67 roll-call votes of the eighteenth session have been used to answer three questions which would seem primary to this description: (i) On what types of issues are the African states united and on what are they divided? (2) On divisive issues, into what groups are they divided? (3) How do the groupings vote, combine, and divide on these divisive issues?

Type
Articles
Information
The Journal of Modern African Studies , Volume 4 , Issue 2 , October 1966 , pp. 213 - 227
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1966

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References

Page 215 note 1 Hovet, Thomas, Bloc Politics at the United Nations (Cambridge, Mass., 1960), p. 31.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Page 215 note 2 Hovet, Thomas, ‘The Role of Africa at the United Nations’, in The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science (Philadelphia), 354, 07 1964, p. 126.Google Scholar

Page 215 note 3 Libya was also present at the original Casablanca Conference but did not sign the Protocol and is not considered a Casablanca member.

Page 217 note 1 Two roll calls condemning South Africa for its apartheid practices in South-West Africa were classified in the second category, condemning racism and apartheid.

Page 218 note 1 For further discussion of this type of error see Lijphart, Arend, ‘The Analysis of Bloc Voting in the General Assembly: a critique and a proposal’, in The American Political Science Review (Washington), 12 1963.Google Scholar

Page 219 note 1 Stuart A. Rice, ‘The Identification of Blocs in Small Political Bodies’, ibid. August 1927, pp. 619 ff.

Page 219 note 2 Kenya and Zanzibar are omitted as they joined the U.N. in December 1963, and thus missed all the earlier roll calls.

Page 221 note 1 Portion of a matrix, showing voting pairs with 75 or more per cent of agreement on 25 low-cohesion roll calls. Voting clusters are marked by solid outlines, and the fringe members by dashes.

Page 222 note 1 The high (91 per cent) Gabon-Mauritania score is misleading. It was seemingly caused by Gabon's absenteeism on the roll calls that divided the other members of Cluster III from Mauritania. The score is based on only II roll calls, the lowest number of any pair on the chart.

Page 223 note 1 Lijphart, op. cit. p. 906.

Page 223 note 2 The four remaining low-cohesion roll calls will be discussed at the end of this section.

Page 225 note 1 Mauritania, Nigeria, and Sierra Leone abstained on the Chinese issue, making it one of the few times that the African states exercised all three voting options in a single roll call.

Page 226 note 1 Scores for pairs from opposite poles were very low, usually ranging from only four to twelve per cent.